An Optimal Control Perspective on Weather and Climate Modification

Intentionally altering natural atmospheric processes using various techniques and technologies for changing weather patterns is one of the appropriate human responses to climate change and can be considered a rather drastic adaptation measure. A fundamental understanding of the human ability to modify weather conditions requires collaborative research in various scientific fields, including, but not limited to, atmospheric sciences and different branches of mathematics. This article being theoretical and methodological in nature, generalizes and, to some extent, summarizes our previous and current research in the field of climate and weather modification and control. By analyzing the deliberate change in weather and climate from an optimal control and dynamical systems perspective, we get the ability to consider the modification of natural atmospheric processes as a dynamic optimization problem with an emphasis on the optimal control problem. Within this conceptual and unified theoretical framework for developing and synthesizing an optimal control for natural weather phenomena, the atmospheric process in question represents a closed-loop dynamical system described by an appropriate mathematical model or, in other words, by a set of differential equations. In this context, the human control actions can be described by variations of the model parameters selected on the basis of sensitivity analysis as control variables. Application of the proposed approach to the problem of weather and climate modification is illustrated using a low-order conceptual model of the Earth’s climate system. For the sake of convenient interpretation, we provide some weather and climate basics, as well as we give a brief glance at control theory and sensitivity analysis of dynamical systems.